Tug of War Stretches Architect’s Legacy

Luis Barragán Homage Tweaks Vitra, the Copyright Owners

Luis Barragán’s San Cristóbal stables in Mexico City from the 1960s.Credit
René Burri/Magnum Photos

When Luis Barragán, considered by many to be Mexico’s greatest architect, died in 1988, he left a scattering of gemlike private houses and public works around Mexico City and Guadalajara, his hometown. But an important part of his legacy — his professional archive and the copyright to designs and images of much of his work — ended up thousands of miles from his native land.

After passing to the widow of Barragán’s business partner, it was sold in 1994 to a wealthy Swiss couple, Rolf Fehlbaum, chairman of Vitra, the international furniture company and design museum, and the woman who was to become his wife, Federica Zanco, an architectural scholar. In the years since, Ms. Zanco has devoted her life to promoting Barragán’s legacy. But her determination to keep the archive at Vitra headquarters near Basel has rankled many in Mexico, who have complained for years about the country’s failure to retain the archive and who say that Ms. Zanco has hindered study of this Pritzker Prize-winning architect where his work is inextricably rooted, keeping his legacy too much to herself.

These cultural tensions have simmered for years. And they are now being brought to the surface by the Brooklyn artist Jill Magid, who — much like Ms. Zanco — had little initial connection to Mexico or Barragán but became drawn to his colorful Modernist work and his highly private life and has injected herself in a personal way into the fray. “Jill Magid: Woman With Sombrero,” an exhibition that opened Saturday at Art in General in TriBeCa, is one of the first salvos in what she plans to be a series of provocative artworks about Barragán that drift surreally somewhere between fact and fiction, the past and the present, and Mexico and Switzerland.

Ms. Magid, 40, has made a name for herself in shows at the Tate Modern and the Whitney with work that, as Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times, “seems motivated by an urge to infiltrate and personalize, if not sexualize,” systems of control in contemporary society. For one piece, she befriended and shadowed a New York City police officer over five months; for another, she arranged for the vast police camera surveillance system in Liverpool, England, to record her movements. In 2005, the Dutch intelligence agency in The Hague paid more than $100,000 to commission an art work from her but ended up confiscating and redacting parts over fears its personal revelations about agents would compromise security.

She became aware of Barragán’s archive almost coincidentally, while showing her work at a Mexico City gallery, Labor, that sits just across the street from Casa Luis Barragán, the architect’s residence until his death and now a museum run by a Mexican foundation created using some of Barragán’s assets after his death.

“The more I dug into it, the story itself was fascinating, but it was more about all the questions it raised about an artist’s history, about history itself,” she said in an interview in her studio in Greenpoint. Of Ms. Zanco’s single-minded dedication to Barragán, for which Ms. Zanco created her own nonprofit organization, the Barragán Foundation, Ms. Magid said, “What’s the difference between loving something and loving something so much that you smother it?”

Photo

Luis Barragán (1902-88), the Mexican architect, whose main archives are now in Switzerland.Credit
René Burri/Magnum Photos

Ms. Magid (pronounced MAGG-id) envisioned Ms. Zanco and the archive as lovers, in a sense, and cast herself as the third leg of a lovers’ triangle, hiring lawyers to help her after Ms. Zanco declined her requests for a visit to the archive and for use of materials. Somewhere in the middle of this triangle is the foundation in Mexico City, the Fundación de Arquitectura Tapatía Luis Barragán, which has often chafed at Ms. Zanco’s control of Barragán’s legacy.

“From time to time, they claim that we cannot publish books, photographs or have films made in our own house — or for that matter in any other of Barragán works, without ‘proper’ permission from their lawyers, and, of course, a fee,” the organization said in a written statement in response to questions about its relationship with the Swiss foundation.

Barragán’s works and images of them, the statement added, “belong to this country and to all people throughout the world that seek the vitality and consolation of beauty. It would be indeed strange to have the ‘rights’ for Frank Lloyd Wright or Louis Kahn held and managed from another country, ruling over their work and limiting access to the American public.”

In a lengthy telephone interview from her foundation offices in Switzerland, Ms. Zanco said that while she understood the feelings of those who would like the archive to remain in Mexico, she sees herself as its savior, having kept it from being sold piecemeal. “Let’s see what would have happened if we had left it,” she said. “It would be scattered. It would be much more difficult to put these things together.”

As for copyright permissions and access to the materials, Ms. Zanco said that her foundation has little time to deal with requests because it has been consumed with trying to complete a two-volume study and catalog of the archive by next year. The money the foundation earns from copyright fees is minuscule, she said.

“What I do fight for is the credit,” she said. “I would like to spread the news that the foundation is here.”

Of those unhappy in Mexico, she said, “Maybe I hurt sensibilities without realizing it.” But she added, “What I do not accept is, ‘Here, we are poor,’ and, ‘There you are rich and colonialist.’ That is not me.”

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The artist Jill Magid with “VitraFutura/Futura,” part of her new show at Art in General in TriBeCa.Credit
Brian Harkin for The New York Times

Ms. Magid, who has delved deeply into many of Barragán’s personal papers, letters and books that remain in a smaller archive in Mexico City, has made intellectual property rights a front-and-center subject of her show at Art in General mainly by going to gymnastic lengths to stay just outside the bounds of copyright infringement.

Images of Barragán works are not reproduced. Instead she bought several copies of a 2001 Barragán book by Ms. Zanco and hung them on the wall like ready-mades, with frames around images so they resemble photographic prints. Unable to get the Swiss foundation to loan a Butaca chair, one of Barragán rare furniture creations, Ms. Magid photographed a miniature of the chair once produced by Vitra and enlarged it to actual size.

Ms. Zanco has warned Ms. Magid in writing to be wary of “copyright implications” in the way she pursues her own Barragán fascinations. But in the interview, Ms. Zanco insisted that she bears no animus toward the artist: “The questions she poses are compelling,” she said. “I love that.” She added that she hoped the two could collaborate in the future.

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Ms. Magid said she hopes so, too. But in the new exhibition, Ms. Zanco often comes off like just another of the implacable agents of control that have featured so prominently in Ms. Magid’s work. And the nature of the collaboration the artist seeks might not be something Ms. Zanco is quite prepared for.

One work at the gallery features the text of an intimate personal letter Barragán once wrote to a woman he knew. But it has been altered by Ms. Magid so that the letter now appears to be from herself to Ms. Zanco.

It begins: “Dearest Federica, I thank you infinitely for keeping the promises you made,” and goes on, “Now I suffer for your absence, and what is even worse, I feel absent from everything around me.”

It ends: “Write a lot and love me. I am wholeheartedly yours,” and is signed Jill Magid.

A version of this article appears in print on November 4, 2013, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Tug of War Stretches Architect’s Legacy. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe